Hunting the Five Point Killer

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “I hope I’m wrong. But the one thing I am certain of is that the officer will go inside with me and check.”

  Arn picked his way from tree to abandoned house to a car up on cinder blocks, following shadows that concealed him, squatting low to prevent the street light from illuminating him. He hunkered down twenty yards in back of the squad car. This would be the most dangerous thing about his approach: the policeman might shoot him before Arn could explain what he wanted.

  He took several deep, calming breaths before walking bent over toward the police car. He whistled, but the policeman remained with his head on his chest, and Arn could almost hear the snoring coming from inside the car. He kept his house in his peripheral vision as he stood upright and rapped on the side of the driver’s window.

  Silence.

  He cupped his flashlight in his hand, shading the bulb, and flicked the light once at the officer. Then he jumped back, startled, and shined the light again. The policeman’s head slumped on his chest, his lifeless eyes seeming to mock him. His throat had been slashed, and he appeared to have bled out. DRT. A piece of notepaper was jammed into the throat, bloody. Staged. Just like Steve and Gaylord’s deaths. You’re wasting your time, the note read, neatly, legibly. Like Dawes’ suicide note. Inside.

  Arn ran bent over toward his house, his footsteps crunching loud on the ice, the full moon illuminating him like a spotlight announcing his approach.

  His front door stood ajar, the snow swirling around in the threshold. He caught a sound coming from in back of his house: the generator he’d bought to get them through until lights could be turned on hummed like distant high-line wires in the cold night air. It hadn’t been run for days. It shouldn’t be running now.

  Light seeped through cracks in the plywood over the windows, and Arn paused at the porch. He bent and ran his hand over tracks leading to the house, but he couldn’t age them with the stiff wind.

  He stepped to the side of the stairs, knowing the center of the steps would creak and alert anyone inside that he’d arrived. He stopped to one side of the door, his breaths coming in great gasps, searing his lungs. He willed himself to take deep, calming breaths. He drew a final breath and buttonhooked through the door, leading with his revolver.

  He flicked on a light in the entryway. No light, and he silently cursed Erv for another botched wiring job. Until he realized whoever held Danny and Ana Maria had tripped the main breaker, leaving only the generator to power the only light shining.

  Arn dropped to his knees while his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the faint light he’d seen from outside coming from somewhere toward the living room.

  Outside, the streetlight filtering through the evil-looking cottonwood tree cast shadows on the wall that looked every bit like a man’s arm waving a warning to him. It had been twenty years since he’d had to search a room by himself, and he tried remembering what his old training officer had said. “Don’t lead with your gun, dummy,” Rolf Vincent had told him. “The bad guy will see you coming even before you clear the corner of the wall. Pie the corner, cutting it so that not much of your head’s exposed. Then you can enter. And most important kid,” Rolf said repeatedly, “don’t ever shit your pants. Don’t let ’em smell you coming.”

  Arn was thankful he hadn’t shit himself yet as he shuffled along the floor, careful not to trip on construction materials or knock over any tools lying about. The generator hummed louder as he approached the living room, the single bulb suspended from the ceiling in front of the white wall swaying with the wind from the open door, the light reflecting in the hallway. The white wall. In the next room. Where Danny and Ana Maria might be held.

  Arn cut the pie, Rolf beside him telling him to calm himself, to take things slow, to move out from the wall an inch at a time. He had moved out far enough to see the bulb, naked and accusing, swinging suspended over a body slumped next to the Five Point victims’ photos pinned to the drywall. A body slumped in a folding chair. Propped up from falling by plastic ties securing him to the chair. Arn scanned the room, but the body was the only one there. He entered the room and knelt by the corpse.

  “Damn, Erv,” Arn heard himself say. He didn’t check for a pulse. He’d attended to enough dead men that he didn’t need to waste his time. “I guess your hearing wasn’t so good after all.” He hastily searched the rest of the house, looking for Erv’s killer, and was sweat-drenched when he finished. He kept his gun beside him as he returned to the living room. A note, pinned through a five-point star badge, had been nailed to Erv’s forehead with an air nailer left in the corner. “Damn, Erv.”

  Arn relaxed his death grip on his gun and walked to the front of the chair. The nail had been shot right above Erv’s nose. A tiny trickle of blood had oozed down his cheek and neck when he slumped over. Erv had died instantly, Arn suspected, his heart having no chance to pump out more blood.

  He resisted the urge to grab the note. The crime scene tech would need to document it. “To hell with the crime scene tech.” Arn snatched the note off the nail. The note, printed neatly, every letter a miniature work of art—like Frank’s invoice Arn had read that day in his shop—instructed him to come to the back door of the Hobby Shop: Come alone. Ana Maria and Danny wish you to join our meeting before they die. “Come alone” had been underlined; a grease spot showed where the corner had been torn off a Snap-on nudie calendar.

  Arn ran out the door. As he shuffled to his car, he flipped his phone open and called police dispatch. He climbed in and started the car. “I need you to stay at my house,” he told Georgia.

  “For what?”

  “Erv—Danny’s friend that’s been staying at the house—is inside. Dead. Someone drove a nail right into his head. And I need you to stay here.” Arn explained that time mattered if he were to save Ana Maria and Danny. “I talked with police dispatch. They’re sending two officers over. I need someone to be at the house when they arrive. Tell them what’s inside.”

  “Let them go to the Hobby shop,” Georgia argued. “That’s what they get paid to do.”

  “I can’t,” Arn said, jamming his gun in his back pocket where he could reach it easier. “I can’t risk officers busting in there. The note said come alone, and for Danny and Ana Maria’s sakes I’d better.”

  “You’re not leaving me alone with a dead man in a dark house.”

  “I turned the breaker back on. The lights and furnace just kicked in. You remember the white wall?”

  Georgia shook. “Where those gruesome photos hang?”

  Arn nodded. “That’s where Erv is.”

  “I’m not—”

  Arn reached over and unlatched the door. “This is non-negotiable. I go it alone.”

  Georgia nodded her understanding and started climbing out when she turned back. She drew Arn’s face close and kissed him. “Watch yourself, Arn Anderson.”

  He waited until he saw Georgia enter the front door of his house before heading to the Hobby Shop.

  Sixty-One

  Arn drove past the Hobby Shop. It had closed hours ago, and he expected it to be darked out, expected Frank to be waiting for him somewhere in the shadows. But it appeared as if every light in the business was burning.

  He parked a block down the street. He walked the opposite side of Lincolnway, keeping the front of the shop in sight. Cars parked at the curb offered him concealment as he kept the Hobby Shop in his vision. A city maintenance truck idled beside an exposed manhole cover while two city workers passed tools between them. One looked askance at Arn as he walked by, the worker’s breath frosting from his ski mask stuck inside his orange hard hat, snot frozen to the outside of the wool.

  When Arn arrived parallel to the Hobby Shop, he leaned over the hood of a parked pickup and studied the storefront window overlooking the street. He detected no movement inside, nothing to indicate where Danny and Ana Maria were being held. If they were still held there. If they
were still alive.

  He recalled the back door from the crime scene sketches Butch had made when investigating Delbert Urban’s murder. Butch noted that Delbert’s killer had gained access to the building via the back door, but had left by the front door. At rush hour. With no one spotting him cloaked in blood. Arn had never been to a knifing where copious amounts of the victim’s blood covered the suspect, and that part in particular had puzzled him. Until this moment.

  “It was the damned mask and gloves.” Arn startled himself with the words. That day at the hospital, waiting for word on Johnny’s condition, the surgeon who’d tried saving an accident victim had been covered in blood. Moments later, the doctor strolled out of the room, clean. Bloodless. Delbert’s murderer had done the same thing, he realized: murdered him wearing a gown and mask and booties. The killer must have stripped off his garb—probably stuffed them in a garbage bag he carried—and just waltzed out of the business. No wonder no one had reported a man walking downtown covered with blood.

  Other things were coming together, those pieces of the puzzle he just couldn’t quite fit but that now were becoming perfectly clear. Of course the killer used a mask. He had access to hospital supplies. Just like he had the day of Johnny’s murder.

  Arn squatted by a car and punched in Oblanski’s number. When it went to voicemail, he outlined as quickly as time would allow what he had just now realized. And how everything fit together. Not with what Butch reported in his investigation. Just the opposite. And the real reason, Arn suspected, that Butch had committed suicide.

  He took his pen knife from his front pocket and stuffed it into his back pocket beside his bandana. He slipped his gun out of his pocket and concealed it beside his leg as he crossed the street to the alley. Arn had had some of his most interesting police experiences in alleys like this one: lonely, dark, and dank, with an overriding atmosphere of foreboding. An alley where sometimes he’d stumble over a sleeping form. Or a dead one, which is what the man in front of him appeared to be, huddled under a blanket covered with a tattered blue tarp. The homeless man yelled and sat upright when Arn accidentally stepped on his leg. His hoodie was pulled tight around his face like a dirty condom, and what few teeth he had chattered in the frigid night air. “Hey pal, you could show some decorum—”

  “Sorry, friend,” Arn whispered. He kept his gun beside his leg and away from the man’s eyes as he walked past him toward the Hobby Shop.

  Arn arrived at the back door. He’d been here many times in his mind, studying the photos and sketches tacked to the white wall. Would he confront Delbert and Joey Bent’s killer on the other side of the door? In his own twisted way, he hoped so. He was tired of being hunted. Now all he wanted was to find and destroy the man who had kept the city hostage a decade ago. Who had abducted Ana Maria and Danny and perhaps killed them. The son-of-a-bitch had crossed the line in taking them. Now it was personal.

  Arn turned the knob, not surprised it was unlocked, and paused. His training officer, Rolf, screamed in his memory: “Don’t ever make the hunt personal. That’s the way you make mistakes, dummy.” Arn took a moment to think about his entry into the building. The killer would have anticipated his coming in through the back door. He wanted him to come through the back door, and Arn knew he had no choice if he wanted to save Ana Maria and Danny.

  He opened the door and slipped inside, keeping his gun tucked close to his body. “Don’t lead with your gun, dummy.” Rolf Vincent’s words echoed in his mind, and he pulled his gun in tighter to his side.

  He slowly made his way to the office area, careful not to brush against the wall and make noise, careful to avoid Hobby Shop inventory parked in the aisle. But he was certain the man he hunted would have known he’d arrived at the shop. He just might not know exactly where.

  When he reached the waist-high windows overlooking the office area, Arn squatted and peeked over, careful that no one on the other side could see him. Ana Maria sat tied to a chair. Her head rested on her chest, and Arn strained to see her take a shallow breath. She was alive, but had been worked over. Her nose appeared to have been broken. Blood dripped onto her white sweatpants, and one eye had swollen shut.

  Danny sat across from her. Duct tape had been plastered across his face, and he thrashed around trying to free himself from plastic ties that anchored him to a metal chair. One of his eyes was quickly closing and blackening, and the skin under that eye was split to the cheek bone.

  Arn ducked back behind the safety of the wall. They were alone, in the next room, and he had heard no one. Yet he knew Erv’s killer lurked close by, waiting for him to step into the trap. He had no choice. Ana Maria may not have long, by the sounds of her agonizing, labored breaths.

  He chanced a last look over the office window and opened the door. Danny turned his head, and Arn flinched. Danny had taken more of a beating that Arn realized. His blood-crusted eyelid hung by a flap over his split cheek, and a red impression the size of a man’s boot had crushed his nose. A wave of recognition overcame Danny along with something else: a warning, his eyes darting between Arn and the closet. Arn and the partially opened closet. Arn and …

  Too late, Arn realized Danny’s warning, and a strong hand came crashing down on his hand. His gun skidded across the floor, a moment before something hit him squarely in the back of the head. Arn’s last thought before he lost consciousness was of his attacker, and how everything fit together at last.

  Sixty-Two

  Arn came to, fighting the plastic restraints holding him fast to a chair. He looked about the room, shaking his head to clear his vision. Blood, sticky and flowing too freely for his liking, dripped onto his hands in back of him.

  Pieter leaned against a wall and pointed a small caliber handgun at Ana Maria’s head, Arn’s gun tucked into his waistband. “I’ll bet you were expecting that buffoon Frank Dull Knife,” Pieter laughed. “ ’Cause I plan to rig this little party so he gets credit for it.”

  “No,” Arn sputtered, spitting a broken tooth onto the floor. “I knew it wasn’t Frank.”

  “Bullshit. You had no idea—”

  “Jefferson Dawes’ note gave you away. Among other things.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sure,” Arn said. “Dawes didn’t write that rambling suicide note, telling us all sorts of things only Gaylord and Steve and the Five Point Killer would know. You only made it appear to be his writing.”

  “I knew you’d check Dawes’ handwriting and discover he usually wrote like he was scribbling with his toes,” Pieter said, waving his gun around in a lose figure eight between Arn and Danny and Ana Maria. “I had to write neat enough that you knew it wasn’t the good doctor. Aunt Georgia said you told her Frank Dull Knife was in your sights. And his writing’s impeccable.”

  “How did you know that?”

  Pieter leaned against one wall and smiled smugly. ”I got into Frank’s shop one night—he’s not the only one who can get in and out without leaving a trace. When I went through notes and invoices on his desk, I noticed how neatly he wrote. Like my third grade teacher.”

  “I knew it wasn’t Frank’s writing.”

  “Then let’s hear how you figured out this little piece of information?”

  “Frank writes like an artist,” Arn said. “But he’s left-handed. When you wrote the note, you tried duplicating his angle. But a right-handed person can just never get it right. So Oblanski and I naturally thought of you.”

  “I gotta call bullshit on that, Mr. Anderson.”

  “You’re a top architect,” Arn said. “Your writing has to be neat. Like a work of art.”

  Pieter held up one hand. “Okay. So I confess. I have to write perfectly on my blueprints.”

  “And on notes like the one nailed to Erv’s head.”

  “Was that his name?” Pieter said. “This is such an impersonal thing I sometimes don’t know—”

  “Your victims?
”

  Pieter turned red. “I considered them … an experiment in pleasure.”

  Arn wiggled his knife from his back pocket while he nodded to Ana Maria and Danny. “I’m here. So there’s no reason to harm them any further. Release them.”

  “Ana Maria and that old guy?”

  “He’s homeless. He won’t say anything. He’ll hop the first freight out of the Union Pacific yards.”

  Danny glared at Arn like he didn’t appreciate the homeless remark.

  “I just can’t let either one wander around knowing—”

  “That you’re the Five Point Killer?”

  Pieter tilted his head back and laughed. Stalling, Arn recognized. He was wondering what Arn knew and who he might have told it to. “That’s what Dad used to call a SWAG: a Scientific Wild Assed Guess,” Pieter said.

  “Is it? Chief Oblanski doesn’t think so.”

  “Neither one of you know squat.”

  “We know enough that you’ll be getting that forever juice at the State Pen once you’re convicted. Or”—Arn forced a grin—“you’ll love this: Wyoming may go to the firing squad to execute their killers.”

  “But you won’t see it,” Pieter said, his voice rising. “You won’t see anything after tonight.”

  “And Chief Oblanski? You going to kill him, too? And the other detectives who know about you?”

  “If they knew anything, they’d be hunting me up right now.”

  “They will. As soon as they finish with the search warrant on your office and home,” Arn lied.” And the evidence techs finish processing my home.”

  Pieter’s smile waned. “And just what do you think you know?”

  “Yeah, what do you know?” Georgia entered the office and shut the door behind her. Her eyes widened as she took in the scene. She stepped toward Pieter, and he swung the gun on Ana Maria.